George Eliot - Daniel Deronda (1876)

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There is a sort of human paste that when it comes near the fire of enthusiasm is only baked into harder shape.

George Eliot
Heat is a great agent and a useful word, but considered as a means of explaining the universe, it requires an extensive knowledge of differences..

George Eliot
The moment of finding a fellow-creature is often as full of mingled doubt and exultation, as the moment of finding an idea.

George Eliot
If you are to rule men, you must rule them through their own ideas.

George Eliot
One couldn't carry on life comfortably without a little blindness to the fact that everything has been said better than we can put it ourselves.

George Eliot
I told her it was not quite en règle to bring one so far out of our own set; but she said, 'Genius itself is not en règle; it comes into the world to make new rules.'

George Eliot
The thing we look forward to often comes to pass, but never precisely in the way we have imagined to ourselves.

George Eliot
Knowledge, through patient and frugal centuries, enlarges discovery and makes record of it; Ignorance wanting its day's dinner, lights a fire with the record, and gives a flavor to its one roast with the burned souls of many generations.

George Eliot
The gods have a curse for him who willingly tells another the wrong road.

George Eliot
Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of of those who diffuse it: it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker.

George Eliot
A woman's heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe.

George Eliot
Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return...

George Eliot
There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

George Eliot
The best augury of a man's success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.

George Eliot
Receptiveness is a rare and massive power, like fortitude.

George Eliot
Much of our waking experience is but a dream in the daylight.

George Eliot
And the intensest form of hatred is that rooted in fear.

George Eliot
In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.

George Eliot
Friendships begin with liking or gratitude—roots that can be pulled up.

George Eliot
For what is love itself, for the one we love best? An enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.

George Eliot
I shall never love anybody. I can't love people. I hate them.' 'The time will come, dear, the time will come.

George Eliot
We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what we imagine might have been.

George Eliot
Perhaps his might be one of the natures where a wise estimate of consequences is fused in the fires of that passionate belief which determines the consequences it believes in.

George Eliot
Better a wrong will than a wavering; better a steadfast enemy than an uncertain friend; better a false belief than no belief at all.

George Eliot
I say that the strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.

George Eliot
It is good to be unselfish and generous; but don't carry that too far. It will not do to give yourself to be melted down for the benefit of the tallow-trade; you must know where to find yourself.

George Eliot
Let my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the hands of the toiler; but let my soul be as a temple of remembrance where the treasures of knowledge enter and the inner sanctuary is hope.

George Eliot
And when a woman's will is as strong as the man's who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.

George Eliot
The miller's daughter of fourteen could not believe that high gentry behaved badly to their wives, but her mother instructed her — "Oh, child, men's men: gentle or simple, they're much of a muchness..."

George Eliot
If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie? We should have no law but the inclination of the moment.

George Eliot